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Comment by Maxion

7 hours ago

To capture it? Quite a few I'd imagine. The energy you could collect though from one hit is quite low.

It's around 1MWh within a fraction of a second.

That means very high peak power, making your whole capture infrastructure extremely expensive, but even capturing 100% of an average lightning bolt is worth <$100 in electricity.

Which is why nobody even attempts this.

  • An actual generation scheme would probably do something with the potential difference prior to dielectric breakdown actually occurring, at any rate.

yea, i think the low efficiency (plus how to predict where lightning would hit!). Might as well just put up a wind turbine, since wind is much more predictable, not to mention easier to harvest.